Tag: Pascal Rubens

There was but one word on the lips of the hardcore at Shrewsbury Folk Festival’s Dance Tent, as it began this year, and that was Naragonia. The dancers are a breed apart at Shrewsbury, many setting foot nowhere else over that August bank holiday weekend.

So, who or what is Naragonia? Rather than a place, this is the name adopted by a group, or two, even, if you allow both the duo and quartet iterations. Active for around 20 years, the duo, Toon Van Mierlo and Pascale Rubens had a couple of years start before they were joined by Maarten Decombel and Luc Pilartz. Nehalennia is the quartet mode, and between them, they brandish an array of accordions, violins, mandola and guitars, with multi-instrumentalist Van Mierlo also adept on bagpipes, saxophone and whistle. Sounds good already, eh?

The dance music of Europe is often less abrasive than that of these wilder islands, mirroring the dances, which are often a more graceful and balletic than the hops, skips and jumps of a ceilidh. The music here, across ten tracks, is similarly often more delicate in flow, sometimes baffling those who love a genre. This is, generically and/or traditionally, folk music, or based therein, but carries also the fumes of a chamber consortium, playing at a medieval court. Chamber folk always sounds such a sterile term, when there is such life in this. I have seen them described as modern chamber neofolk, and that is scarcely any better. Why don’t you be the judge, calling it whatever you want to call it.

‘Limosa’ enters the fray, already on a lick, with rhythmic guitar chords and scrubbed violin. Paired accordions vie with the violin for attention, playing similar, but never quite the same, notes, a repeating moment that imprints. There is a bodhran, from guest Jeroen Geerinck, adding further momentum, ahead a twist, two thirds in, when the melody takes a darker turn. To my unattuned ears, this has the smack of a pavement cafe, or, better, a busker, in an underpass, during a rainstorm. Not dour, dreich rain, more an exhilarating and exciting cloudburst. The band sound near orchestral, it hard to believe how few of them there actually are.

The title track, up next, references the godess of that name, worshipped in the 2nd and 3rd centuries B.C., in what might now be called Zeeland, in the south west of the Netherlands. Responsible for the safety of travellers, especially across the sea, she was an important totem for the wild and wayfaring people of that region, irrespective the nominal Roman rule over them. The tune is appropriately mystic, pizzicato strings picking out a mantra. A single accordion sails in, soon echoed by the second. Van Mierlo and Rubens are so attuned with the play of each other as to make the two boxes sometimes appear as one; it is only as you try to figure out the complexity that it clicks there are actually two.

Nothing much happens, it doesn’t need to, outwith the minimalism of the theme, this being core to their ethos. Listen a few times. A single first listen may be insufficient to draw out each and all the individual nuances, so give this time, especially as Decombel introduces some gently rolling guitar progressions.

‘Heppiestep’ probably doesn’t translate as happy step, but, in my mind, I feel it could or even should. This is a gleeful oratory, led out by Van Mierlo’s bagpipes.or doedelzak, as the Dutch/Flemish instrument he favours is known. A slowly progressing drone build beneath, together with a mesh of picked guitar and I feel transported to the place of my mistranslation, not least as it switches into an obvious dance of joy.

Sticking with pipes is ‘The Mistle Thrush’, but, ahead the instrumental mimicry of the songbird, the track is prefaced by captured sound of the real thing. Gradually guitar and accordion pick up the cadence. But it is when the deep and rich tone of these bagpipes enter that it become truly transportative. Again the message is in the weaving in and out of the same notes, subtly altering texture and tone, before dropping back to the birds, alone.

‘Yowjef’ is a more angular beast, the guitar straying in from the sort of prog-acoustica Steve Howe applies, outside of Yes. The accordions add a renaissance dance feel to it, before a new sound makes itself present. This the hurdy gurdy of erstwhile Blowzabella man, Gregory Jolivet. I love the vibe this instrument offers, a sense of rotation, and we need more Jolivets and, for that matter, (Nigel) Eatons.

I wonder if you can guess who it is, being cited in ‘We All Steal From Andy And We Love It?’ I feel little doubt it is Mr Cutting, whose prowess on the diatonic accordion is clearly as revered in mainland Europe, as it is here. Whether it is a direct lift, who knows, but I can only see him grinning at the outcome, the two boxes squeezing away with pleasure, in almost unison with the fiddle of Pilartz. If the last few tunes are jolly, this one reeks of an overspilling merry mischief, and had even me swaying across the kitchen floor. Hum along and try to stop your body from moving. It’s difficult.

If that was difficult, the pell-mell hurly burly of ‘Desman’ is well nigh impossible, an impressive explosion of play that riots along at a pace of knots. Pipes weave a rapid tight circulating figure that needs Geerinck’s bodhran to hold it all in stay. A brief scurry of baroque repetition makes for an entertaining middle eight, then taking over whole direction of flow, not without some suspicion that the speedo is set on sly acceleration. Wonderful and exhausting both.

I’m not lying, I needed the slower pastorale of ‘Dr. Sue’, which follows, even as I sat, largely writing, a delicate construction of dual boxes, guitar and violin, carrying whiffs of the sort of tunes Thijs Van Leer would use for Focus, all seeping in and to the good. The only track running at (just) over 5 minutes, it isn’t a moment too long, and what struck me as the auditory hallucination of oboe, must surely be saxophone, from Van Mierlo.

A touch of Irish is certainly present in the carefully controlled jiggery pokery of ‘Paddy’s New Hair’. Who Paddy, I don’t know, but I hope he is as forgiving as Andy Cutting. It becomes a more rhythmic march, and there is some whistle in there too, I’m sure. It’s somewhere, anyway, Van Mierlo again. It is rousing stuff, if less abandon inspiring, which is fine, as there is only so much I can take. ‘Vanellus’ seals the set with, probably, the sort of sound I was expecting all of this album to sound like, being a bucolic blunderbuss of balfolk. Shut your eyes and it is the sound of late nights and early mornings, at Shrewsbury, or up the hill at Sidmouth. Once again, it is as the pipes come out, that the stratosphere is breached.

You know, they could have produced a whole album, chocka with ‘Vanellus’-like frolics, and it would have been good. But, by playing around that undoubted strength, and finding others, that it really takes off. All these tunes come from Van Mierlo, even the one he suggests they nicked, and the whole is both a corker and keeper, for wallflowers and dancers both. Dance music for the feet and the frontal cortex.

Seuras Og 

Artists website: www.naragonia.com

‘Yowjef’: